About The IGF

IndieGames.com is presented by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, which runs the Independent Games Festival & Summit every year at Game Developers Conference. The company (producer of the Game Developers Conference series, Gamasutra.com and Game Developer magazine) established the Independent Games Festival in 1998 to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers.

Cloning indie devs is hard. That's probably not the lesson developers Rik Nieuwdorp and Martijn Frazer want to impart foremost, but succeeding as the cloner in the free sim Vlambeer Clone Tycoon seems tough. Then again, maybe that's how it should be.

The developers described the purpose of the clone creator sim to be "to demonstrate how dismal it is to clone games by letting people experience this activity themselves..., a game in which the player assumes the role of a cloner with the single goal of ripping off Vlambeer as hard as possible." To top it off, you also have to release the game before Vlambeer and avoid legal troubles.